How to deal with a team member who violates Retrospective trust?
Hello,
I'm a Scrum Master on a a team that has been together for almost a year. We just added some new team members to the team. One of the original team members took notes (not agreed upon by the team) from the Retrospective and send out questions to the group, upper management and our agile coach without getting the team's permission thus breaking the Retrospective trust within the old members and creating conflict.
When I have attempted in the past to remind this team member of agile practices in the past they become defensive and hostile.
I'm at a loss on how to handle this break in trust as I've worked several months to having a better working relationship with this team member (they have openly disagreed with our agile practices in the padt) and even if I address this one on one there is a likely chance they will not take it as constructive criticism. They may also looking for support from other team members to sympathize with him which causes dissention within the team.
I can only think to ask my agile coach to play "bad cop" and have him attend our next Retrospective and reiterate the Vegas rules.
My alternative is to talk to our manager and have him address it one on one with him...
Any advice is welcome. I realize too I may be part of the problem. But I need to fix this ASAP.
Thank you!
Just a question: Is the rule to not share retrospective content accepted within the rest of the team?
I'm going to start with something that you will probably hear from a lot of people.
What does the team think about this? You don't state anywhere in your post that anyone else on the team feels this is a problem that needs to be fixed ASAP.
Remember that as Scrum Master you are not the one to "deal with a team member". In my opinion, you should not be addressing this with the specific individual but you should be facilitating a discussion on this with the whole team during a retrospective. If your team does honor the Scrum values then courage to have difficult discussions, respect for each other to voice their opinions, openness to come to an agreement that all can honor, commitment to each other to work together to be a better team should help the team focus on being a better team.
If you really feel the need to talk to your agile coach or manager, don't approach it as "can you make them stop". Approach it as "I am working on a situation that you should be aware of and I may come to you for advice". In truth if they also value Scrum values, then they will already understand what is happening and will respect you to work it out with the team.
TL;DR This isn't your problem to solve. It is a team issue and everyone should be involved if they feel it is a problem. You are just one member of that team so don't try to force your feelings on the team.
thus breaking the Retrospective trust within the old members
How do you know this has happened? Has the team acknowledged that there is a "trust" issue with this particular team member?
Thank you all for your replies!
I did discuss this with my coach and another trusted agile professional.
They echo pretty much the same ideas and questions.
I've told the team I am in the retrospective meeting to help identify and remove impediments for the team and in doing so will not indicate or identify any team members comments unless expressly agreed to by the team.
I'm going to present a Retrospective meeting rules subject for our next Reteospective, provide the agile guidelines and let the team take over from there. We just added new team members and this should be done again anyways.
I will be doing a ton of research on facilitating and am working to not project my opinion to allow team members to voice their opinions.
I also may try to do an online board since we are a distributed team so subjects can be brought up annonmoysly.
Any other advice is welcome.